NO ONE NOTICED

"It happened so easily," reports Jerusalem bureau chief Lisa Beyer, who joined millions of Israelis Tuesday evening in watching a broadcast of a grainy amateur videotape of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. "No one made any effort to stop the assassin. Television showed with arrows how incredibly easy it was for him. You see him for some time milling around the area where Rabin was going to get into his car. At one point, he was surrounded by three policemen who were just sitting right next to him and obviously weren't suspicious. You see him standing there cool as a cucumber for a very long time. It was clear how he was going to do it. He shoots Rabin with the gun virtually against his skin." Beyer says the tape clearly shows that Yigal Amir, who has confessed to plotting to kill both Rabin and his dovish successor as prime minister, Shimon Peres, had at least two chances to kill Peres as well. "He decided not to kill Peres simply because then he would not have had an opportunity to kill Rabin. But there was nothing to stop him. This is not like the Zapruder film; there is not going to be a world-famous frame. Still, it is devastating to see this huge man killed, and to see how easily it was done."